Zelle is shutting down its stand-alone app on Tuesday, according to a company blog post.
This news might be alarming if you’re one of the over 150 million customers in the U.S. who use Zelle for person-to-person payments. But only about 2% of transactions take place via Zelle’s app, which is why the company is discontinuing its stand-alone app.
Most consumers access Zelle via their bank, which then allows them to send money to their phone contacts. Zelle users who relied on the stand-alone app will have to re-enroll in the service through another financial institution.
Given the small user base of the Zelle app, it makes sense why the company would decide to get rid of it — maintaining an app takes time and money, especially one where people’s financial information is involved.
Zelle launched in 2017 with backing from 30 banks to be a more efficient alternative to Venmo. On Venmo, users can receive payments into their own Venmo wallet, which they can then deposit into their actual bank account — but if you don’t want to wait a few days for the deposit to process, you’ll have to pay a fee for an instant transfer. Because of Zelle’s connections with banks, it’s able to offer instant transfers without charging additional fees.
Zelle said that in 2024, users sent $1 trillion in payments, breaking the record of any other payment app. This might be the case because consumers tend to use Zelle for larger payments like rent. Venmo, on the other hand, is designed for more social use, like reimbursing a friend for dinner.
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Skylight, a startup taking on TikTok with a more open alternative, is launching its mobile app to the public on Tuesday after just 10 weeks of active development. The app, which is backed by Mark Cuban and others, is now one of many to build on top of the AT Protocol — the same technology that underpins the social network Bluesky and a growing number of other apps.
Developed by co-founders Tori White (CEO) and Reed Hermeyer (CTO), Skylight offers a short-form video app experience with many familiar features, including an in-app video editor; the ability to comment, like, and share videos; set up your own user profile; and follow others.
Because it’s also built on the AT Protocol (or “ATProto” for short), users will immediately be tapped into Bluesky’s network of over 33.8 million users. That means videos posted on Skylight can be seen and engaged with by users on Bluesky and other ATProto-based apps, like the more photo-centric app Flashes, for example.
The company is funded by a pre-seed round from Cuban, who said earlier this year that he wanted to fund a TikTok alternative built on the AT Protocol. Leslie Feinzaig’s Graham & Walker Venture Fund also invested.
White, who used to be a travel influencer and is now a self-taught software developer living in Seattle, says she and co-founder Hermeyer were inspired to create Skylight when they first heard that TikTok was getting banned in the U.S.
In preparation for the ban, which is currently on pause, White had backed up her TikTok videos. But she still worried about losing access to her community and comments. She and Hermeyer had already been playing around with ATProto and saw the potential.
“The first thing that interested us about ATProto was that Bluesky was not failing,” Hermeyer told TechCrunch at the ATmosphere Conference in Seattle in March. “We didn’t see the ‘fail whale,’” he said, a reference to the graphic that appeared in Twitter’s early days when the app was constantly crashing. “That made us feel comfortable about the underlying technology.”
Hermeyer and White soon realized this was an ideal time to build a new social app on the protocol that could be “ban-proof.”
Tapping into her influencer background, White began documenting Skylight’s development on TikTok, which helped bring exposure to the product and build a following of potentially interested users.
“We started with distribution,” White explained. “I actually made a video before we ever wrote a line of code for this … [so] everyone can follow our journey as we build,” she told TechCrunch at the conference. “We were like, oh my gosh, we are building this thing that we think is so cool, but no one cares yet. So we have to build a way to tell people about it so that they would care, because we know people need it,” she said.
Today, White’s @buildwithtori TikTok profile has nearly 50,000 followers, many of which turned into early testers.
Like Bluesky, Skylight supports video uploads of up to three minutes in length, a recent increase from the one-minute-long videos supported previously. But White sees Skylight becoming more than just a decentralized TikTok clone.
She hints that Skylight in the future will allow users to customize their feed, including by utilizing new gestures beyond swiping and scrolling.
Other features in the works include support for sounds, duets, stitching, bookmarks, and playlists.
The app is in beta on the Google Play Store and is now available publicly on Apple’s App Store after initial testing.
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TikTok is shutting down its Instagram competitor, TikTok Notes, on May 8. The photo-sharing app launched in testing in Canada, Australia, and Vietnam last year.
The company is notifying TikTok Notes users of its decision to retire the app and is directing them to ByteDance-owned Lemon8, which isn’t surprising given that the apps are quite similar and offer the same sort of functionality.
“We’re excited to bring the feedback from TikTok Notes to Lemon8 as we continue building a dedicated space for our community to share and experience photo content, designed to complement and enhance the TikTok experience,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch.
While TikTok didn’t provide a specific reason for shutting down the app, it’s likely that the company didn’t see much adoption for TikTok Notes and is deciding to instead push Lemon8, which had around 12.5 million global monthly active users as of December 2024.
In a notice to TikTok Notes users, TikTok says the decision to shut down the app “was not made lightly.” The notice encourages users to download and save their TikTok Notes data and “continue sharing your creativity on Lemon8.” TikTok says that “Lemon8 is a lifestyle app that offers a similar experience to TikTok Notes” but with “even more features.”
Lemon8 launched in Japan in 2020 and later expanded to markets across the U.S. and Southeast Asia. The app is similar to Instagram and Pinterest, as it lets users share slideshows and photo collections and browse content through “Following” and “For You” feeds. Lemon8 offers users access to creative tools, filters, effects, stickers, text templates, and more.
While TikTok is pushing Lemon8 as an alternative to TikTok Notes, ByteDance has also tried to position the app as an alternative to TikTok itself in the face of a potential U.S. ban.
Last November, the company made it possible for users to directly access Lemon8 with their TikTok accounts and rolled out the ability for users to cross-share photo content between the apps. The move was seen as a way for ByteDance to move creators onto the new platform without having to get them to sign up for it separately in case TikTok were to go away.
Fast-forward to today, and TikTok continues to promote Lemon8 in its app as it faces a new ban deadline of April 5.
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You know the online dating scene is bad when dating giants like Tinder are now introducing AI personas for users to flirt with.
On Tuesday, the company announced a new game powered by OpenAI, allowing users to interact with an AI bot to practice flirting, reenact meet-cute scenarios, and receive scores with suggestions for improving their dating skills.
To play Tinder’s The Game Game, tap the Tinder logo in the top left corner of the app. The game gives users a deck of cards, with each one featuring a different AI persona and scenario. Users must use their voices to respond and try to flirt their way into getting a date with the bot.
After the interaction, users are scored on a three-point scale using flame emojis. The AI provides real-time feedback throughout the experience. If users are rude, for instance, the AI offers suggestions to improve the conversation.
According to the company, the new game is intended to provide a fun and lighthearted experience, not to be taken too seriously. It’s only available for U.S. users on iOS for a limited time.
However, the trend of people flirting with AI bots is becoming scarily popular, and Tinder seems to be banking on this as a way to attract more users amid its struggles for growth. There are already existing apps in this space, such as Replika’s AI dating sim Blush, Teaser, and Rizz.
Tinder has announced other AI features, such as an AI photo selector tool that launched last year and upcoming features for discovery and matching.
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OpenAI’s ChatGPT may be the world’s most popular chatbot app. But rival services are gaining, according to data from analytics firms Similarweb and Sensor Tower.
SimilarWeb, which estimates traffic to websites including chatbot web apps, has recorded healthy recent upticks in usage across bots like Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered Copilot. Gemini’s web traffic grew to 10.9 million average daily visits worldwide in March, up 7.4% month-over-month, while daily visits to Copilot increased to 2.4 million — up 2.1% from February.
Similarweb reports that Anthropic’s Claude reached 3.3 million average daily visits in March, and Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s chatbot eclipsed 16.5 million visits that same month. Meanwhile, xAI’s Grok, which only gained a web app several months ago, averaged the same number of daily web visits as DeepSeek’s chatbot: 16.5 million.
The numbers pale in comparison to ChatGPT, which surged past 500 million weekly active users in late March. Yet David Carr, editor at Similarweb, noted that there’s fierce competition for the No. 2 chatbot spot.
“[F]or March, DeepSeek is in second place, despite seeing traffic drop 25% from where it was in February, based on daily visits,” Carr told TechCrunch. “China’s DeepSeek came out of nowhere in January, but the AI platform with the greatest momentum at the moment is Grok from Elon Musk’s xAI, with traffic up nearly 800% month-over-month.”
AI companies’ mobile chatbot apps have been growing their user bases, too, perhaps fueled by recent AI model releases.
According to metrics from app data analysis company Sensor Tower, the Claude app saw a 21% week-over-week increase in weekly active users during the week of February 24, when Anthropic released its latest flagship AI model Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Two weeks prior, shortly after Google made its Gemini 2.0 Flash model generally available, the number of Gemini app weekly active users grew by 42%.
Abraham Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, attributed the rising tides not only to new models, but new capabilities, as well. Just this past month, Google brought a “canvas” feature to Gemini that lets users preview the output of coding projects, and Anthropic has steadily added tools to its Claude client.
“The rollout of popular new AI models, heightened consumer interest in the space, the introduction of various new features and functions, and the growing number of unique use cases has propelled user growth for AI chatbot apps,” Yousef told TechCrunch.
But OpenAI probably isn’t panicking yet. Yousef pointed out that ChatGPT had 10x mobile app weekly active users compared to Gemini and Claude combined as of March.
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Despite Google’s intentions for its default image viewing and editing app for Android, the Photos app has, over the years, become one of the most popular photo backup services around. In fact, it was one of the most attractive offerings for years until it stopped offering unlimited storage in 2020.
That change in the tech giant’s strategy has left some space for other photo backup services to grow and showcase their offerings to people. Especially for people who don’t want to hand over pictures of their entire life to big tech companies, photo backup services that focus on privacy have become really attractive. That’s where Ente comes in.
An open-source project by Vishnu Mohandas, a former Google employee, Ente (which means “Mine” in Malayalam) offers end-to-end encrypted photo storage across various platforms — meaning the service cannot access its users’ photos at all. The startup says it stores photos at three different locations for better reliability and access, and the open-source nature of the project means anyone can inspect the code or even spin up their own server to store their pictures securely.
The company says all its user-facing features are processed on-device — the processing for features like identifying faces and locations, creating themes and curating memories is done locally — and the processed information is synced with other devices using end-to-end encryption. You can also use natural language to search for photos, such as “beach sunsets in India.”
The service offers a web client as well as Android, iOS and desktop apps, and comes with 10GB of free storage. Users can pay for plans starting from $9.99 per month for 1TB of storage, and can share one account with five people.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Mohandas said that while he uses a lot of Google products, including Photos, the company’s privacy practices made him uncomfortable.
“Google takes security seriously, but not user privacy. They don’t really care about customer data or what implications can come from being careless about it. In hindsight, this is not surprising because they are an advertisement company,” Mohandas said. He eventually tried out Apple and Dropbox but wasn’t satisfied with their interfaces or how difficult it was to access pictures across different platforms and devices.
Ente, which is bootstrapped, claims it has over 150,000 registered customers who have collectively stored over 165 million photos on the app. Despite the traction, Mohandas says the company doesn’t yet have any ambitions to seek out venture capital.
“The cost of a company like us shutting down is really high, as all our customers would need to take off their data. We don’t want to take venture money at the moment and try and get growth in a manner that could lead us to shut down,” Mohandas said.
He said the open-source community around Ente is strong, and all its 12 employees were previously part of the community. The company also offers dedicated support for folks who want to self-host the app.
Mohandas realizes that privacy features aren’t going to be enough to sell a service like this and says that’s why Ente has tried to maintain feature parity with services like Google Photos. The startup is also considering releasing an Android app that doesn’t require users to log in and offers photo categorization features locally.
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